IOTA’s Tangle: Redefining Blockchain, Going Beyond the Crypto Economy

August 3015:582019

CO-CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS & FOUNDER, David Sønstebø

Iota Foundation

Nowadays, blockchain has become a buzz word we hear almost everywhere. Blockchain news, however, is almost always associated with the crypto economy. As a result, very few “non-technical” people can distinguish the different applications of blockchain besides its common association with cryptocurrency.

The founders of IOTA Foundation have envisioned something different: an open-source, fee-free distributed technology platform used in global power projects from sustainability to transportation, smart cities, health care, supply chain, and more. This global non-profit has created The Tangle a stream of interlinked and individual transactions. These transactions are distributed and stored across a decentralized network of participants. Open and available for any institution or enterprise to use, this social-good approach to technology has attracted such partners as Jaguar |Land Rover, Bosch, the city of Tustin, Texas, Taipei, Lady Gaga’s fashion brand, Alyx and a slew of other collaborators.

As society starts to use the machine to machine technology to engage in more and more microtransactions, platforms with embedded fees will quickly become financially unsustainable. The use of distributed ledger technology that is open source and fee-free solves this issue and points to greater societal collaboration.

Reported below a few questions asked to IOTA founder David Sonstebo to better understand this transformation.

Q.What is the Tangle?

A. The Tangle is the technology heart of the IOTA Foundation; a permissionless, feeless, multi-dimensional distributed ledger, designed as the foundation of a global protocol for all things connected. The Tangle is a technology that enables Internet of Things (IoT) innovation through machine-to-machine micropayments and more. It’s designed for a global economy powered by IoT, freely available and unimpeded by the limitations of traditional blockchain.

The Tangle’s unique properties are designed to deliver industry-changing IoT innovation in such areas as supply chain, mobility and automotive, eHealth and smart energy/connected cities and social impact initiatives.

Q. How does Tangle position in comparison with other blockchain-based products?

A. The Tangle, while a distributed ledger technology, is very different from blockchain. It challenges the traditional limitations of blockchain regarding issues of scalability, energy resource requirements and data security, as well as transaction fees. Conventional blockchain structure consists of an orderly, backlisted log of linear links or transaction, which has limited scalability and requires immense consumption of resources through its data mining “proof of concept” operations.

The IOTA Tangle on the other hand, is a stream of interlinked and individual transactions known as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). These transactions are distributed and stored across a decentralized network of participants. Because of its structure and its non-linear approach structure, it is able to link and process transactions at higher speeds, with greater immutability and the ability to scale far beyond blockchain capabilities.The Tangle’s reliance on distributed nodes to establish its proof of concept consumes far fewer resources and is more ecologically sustainable.

Q.In your opinion, why is blockchain always associated with Cryptocurrency? Is it because of economic interest?

A. As the popularity of blockchain exploded in 2017 there was an onslaught of new cryptocurrencies created out of thin air by dubious people and mass-marketed under the guise of serving as a currency for every use case under the sun. Millions upon millions poured billions of dollars into these get-rich-quick scheme cryptocurrencies. This created a wildly speculative and profit driven market. Simultaneously it did expose the mainstream to the concept of cryptocurrencies for different applications, so this use case of distributed ledger technology is the first thing that comes to mind for many. Fortunately we do not need 1 million different cryptocurrencies for 1 million different applications, we only need one that can be standardized across industries. As noted earlier, the problem has been to solve the issues of scalability and cost, a challenge now solved by the IOTA Foundation and its feeless, open-source DAG approach to distributed ledger technology.